Raffa Yoga Festival to Bring Together New England Yogis

Raffa Yoga Festival to Bring Together New England Yogis

A yoga festival is the perfect place to give your practice the jump-start it needs, discover new teachers or ideas, and a way to experience the power of coming together. This summer in Providence, Rhode Island, hundreds of yogis will gather together to participate in Raffa Yoga Festival.

Christina Russillo, the general manager of Raffa Yoga, sat down with Mindful Studio to answer a few questions about what will happen at the festival.

Mindful Studio: Why did you decide to create Raffa Yoga Festival?

Christina Russillo: Last year, we had built a 12,000-square-foot field surrounded by wildflowers and beautiful landscape; it is a breathtaking space. We have these winding stairs that lead down from the studio to the field. It is so vast, it could hold over a thousand yogis on any given day. We decided to build a stage at one end of it. We had a class there and it had the perfect energy — it felt like the perfect place to host a yoga festival.

MS: What will the structure look like? Who will be the teachers and what styles will be offered?

CR: There are quite a few yoga studios in the New England area, and the yoga community is very large. Our intention is to bring the entire community together. It isn’t just our yoga festival, this is everyone’s festival. It is a celebration of the yoga movement in New England. We are welcoming every yoga studio, and we want to have a great lineup on the stage throughout the day with yoga teachers from all different studios in the area.

We are going to be welcoming all types of yoga. We want to start the day with the grassroots of how yoga started in New England, which is with the Native Americans. There will be a drumming performance in this style to get the festival kicked off. Then the day will progress with various studios presenting their classes and representing their space. We want to have Yin yoga, Kundalini yoga and any other style studios practice.

MS: Will there be vendors? How did you determine who would be a good fit for the festival?

CR: We will have food and shopping vendors set up all day. We have an amazing raw café here at Raffa so we will be supplying amazing food and are welcoming vendors with other types of food, juices or drinks as well. We have organically been reaching out to vendors. We have participated in so many expos or health fairs that we have a great database of vendors. We are also relying on our community to express which vendors they would like to see at the festival.